Kixeye is part of a class of companies that is taking Facebook gaming far from its “Cow Clicker” past. The company doesn’t target the stereotypical 35-year-old female demographic that Zynga is well-known for, but rather a subset of hardcore gamers that are willing to pay up.

Think fewer virtual potatoes and more epic sea battles with pirates.

“We haven’t sold our souls,” said Kixeye’s chief executive Will Harbin, who plays the company’s games for a few hours every day. “We have found a formula where we can make games that we’re super proud of and that are efficient at contributing to our bottom line.” (That’s Harbin in the picture at the top. Yes, really.)

The company only has a few games under its belt, but they have a longer life cycle than other Facebook games as players stick around for longer.

Battle Pirates is set in a post-apocalyptic world where the entire Earth is submerged under water (kind of like Waterworld minus Kevin Costner). Players have to build and defend bases against the Draconian Empire. Then there’s Backyard Monsters, which has had a surprisingly long lifespan for a Facebook game after launching more than two years ago. The real-time strategy game has players building and raising a monster army. It’s gotten edgier over its life as Kixeye has gotten more comfortable with its demographic.

That strategy of building very immersive games for a smaller, but more lucrative, segment of the market represents a shift that’s happened on the Facebook platform over the past year. Games on the platform are becoming a lot more diverse than the casual, resource-management or simulation games that have dominated over the past two years. There are games with rich storylines, hidden object titles and bingo. The audience that Kixeye and other similar developers like Kabam and KlickNation, which EA acquired, is just one corner of this changing landscape.

Facebook seems eager to embrace this change too. “It’s our job in the ecosystem to make sure that quality is highly-rewarded,” said Matt Wyndowe, a product manager for games at Facebook. “Developers are finding that there is enormous potential in higher-quality gaming brackets.”

Meanwhile, casual mass-market developers are finding a tougher competitive landscape. You can see a visible slowdown in Zynga’s bookings growth over the past year as Facebook’s 30 percent revenue share ate into the company’s margins. Other social game developers like Kabam, Crowdstar, Funzio and perhaps most notably, OMGPOP, have diversified onto mobile platforms like iOS and Android in the face of thinning profit margins on Facebook.

“Frankly, we don’t need the viral bullshit that other developers depend on,” Harbin said in his characteristically blunt way. “We have the luxury to make the games we want to make.”

Just to give you a rundown of how sticky Kixeye’s games are, the company shared some stats on engagement. The average session length in a Kixeye title is more than 30 minutes and the company’s daily active users have been playing its titles for more than seven months on average. While the average social game might make 4 cents per day per user, Kixeye makes about 20 times that on a per-user basis. (Zynga’s was 6.1 cents per day in the fourth quarter of last year, according to its earnings report.)

Surprisingly, Harbin says he’s not that interested in mobile for the time being. He’s laser-focused on browser-based games. Of course, the long-term question is about how large Kixeye’s market opportunity will ultimately be. Their approach is niche by definition, so how far can it scale?

“Our market is maybe 8 percent saturated,” Harbin said.

To grow its base, Kixeye is looking to launch a web destination off Facebook sometime in the summer. He says Facebook gaming still has a certain stigma attached to it and Kixeye’s hardcore players might feel more comfortable on a site that the company wholly owns.

By next year, the company would like to have a 50-50 split in revenue from Facebook and from its own destination. Kixeye is also looking to staff up to about 300 people by year-end. To do so, they’ve stocked up on these ads with wolves (pictured below) that you might have seen while riding the BART trains around the San Francisco Bay Area.

The company’s momentum has piqued the interest of both investors and prospective buyers. When Andrew Trader, who was part of Zynga’s founding team, came onto the company’s board of directors last fall, Kixeye’s $18 million funding round was so oversubscribed that he couldn’t get his venture firm Maveron into the deal.

“Kixeye’s execution has been incredible,” Trader said. “They’re able to monetize revenge. When one of my friends comes to blow up my base in Battle Pirates, I can’t wait to repay the favor and I’ll pay for the privilege to speed that up.”

Born under the name Casual Collective, Kixeye has raised $19 million to date from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Jafco Ventures and Trinity Ventures. This raises the long-term question of whether Kixeye wants to stay independent or join a larger entity. Another company focused on the same demographic, KlickNation, was acquired by EA last fall.

Like many CEOs I talk to, Harbin deflects the question.

“We’re financially independent. We don’t need funding. We don’t need to sell,” he said. ” But obviously, at some point we’ll have to provide liquidity for our shareholders.”

There are interesting candidates out there. Nexon, the Asian freemium gaming company that went public just days before Zynga did, is focused on immersive games. And just because EA did KlickNation, that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t consider another gaming company like Kixeye.

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OverviewFounded in 2007, KIXEYE (formerly Casual Collective) is an independent game developer that makes games for gamers by gamers. Responsible for popular titles like Desktop Defender, Backyard Monsters, Battle Pirates and War Commander. KIXEYE is the first to deliver proper game play experiences on social networks. The company is based in San Francisco and backed by Trinity Ventures and Lightspeed Venture …